July 9 - MORE Zucchini?

My parents very kindly picked up our box today since I was away and Mark gets home too late. It also gave them an opportunity to see how the whole pick up process works and to take a vegetable or two for themselves from my box. (Thank you, THANK YOU, parents, for taking a zucchini!) It's not that I don't like zucchini - I do. But wow - I have quite the zucchini collection at this point.

The other fun thing about having my parents pick up my veggies, is I got to play the "guess the vegetable" game with them this week. They were (I hate to say it) a bit better at identifying things than Mark was, but a few things stumped them. For example, "a fluffy green thing that looks like the top of a carrot" was dill. And, "a little red lettuce" was radicchio, which I suppose if you think about it actually IS a little red lettuce. They didn't mention the extra surprise though, which was absolutely fantastic flat leaf parsley.

If you're wondering, this is what we got:

• Swiss chard (Holy cow - is there no end to the swiss chard! I'm going to need to get inventive with the cooking.)
• Beets - yay
• Dill - this is GREAT in salads and smells heavenly
• Zucchini - need I say more
• Yellow squash - yes, I realize that this is really just a zucchini of a different color, but somehow I like its golden cheerful color more.
• Cucumbers - always useful
• Radicchio - I like to shred some of this in a salad. It's bitter, so you wouldn't necessarily want to eat it straight, but it really adds, both in color and flavor, to a salad.
• Red Batavian Lettuce - nice, sort of wavy leaves
• Romaine lettuce - always useful, but the curlier lettuces fill up the salad bowl more easily.
• Parsley - this is honestly the VERY BEST parsley I have ever tasted. I put it in our salad.

Tonight I brought a huge bowl of salad to my parents' house. It had two types of lettuce, yellow squash, radicchio, dill, parsley, white salad turnips (from last week) and shredded carrot (also from last week). It was a big hit, and really, I'm not sure if I've ever had a fresher salad.

Beets

WOW. Who knew that beets were so good? Not me. I confess that until now the only beets I'd ever had were either pickled or from a can. Even the one time that I made a beet side dish, I started with canned beets. Little did I know what I was missing.

Mark and I had a real beet experience last week. First I steamed the greens and we ate them with a bit of butter on top. Yum! Then I boiled the beets, peeled them, cut them into cubes, and spinkled them with lemon dijon vinagrette dressing while they were warm. They were unbelievably good. We ate the whole bunch of beets in just about one sitting. (I even saved the water that I'd boiled the beets in, and we drank that. It looks like Kool Aid, but it makes you feel like you're detoxifying yourself from all the junk you've eaten over the last month.)

July 2 - Guess the Vegetable

Because I'm on vacation in Vermont and New Hampshire, my good friend Marla kindly picked up my vegetables and brought them to my house and left them for my husband. This resulted in Mark and I getting to play a wonderful game on the phone tonight that I call "guess the vegetable." It went something like this...

Ann: "What did we get today?"
Mark: "Well, there are some whitish things in a bunch."
Ann: "What sort of whitish things?"
Mark: "I think they might grow underground."
Ann: "Do they look like anything you've ever seen before?"
Mark: "Maybe they're some kind of onion? They're about an inch across and and inch and a half tall."
Ann: "Do they have layers like an onion?"
Mark: "No."
Ann: "What does the top look like?"
Mark: "There are some kind of leaves sprouting out of the top."

Etc, etc, etc. In case you were wondering, I guess white radishes or turnips. Turns out they were baby salad turnips. We went through many iterations of this same conversation as we tried to figure out what the other veggies were. To his credit, Mark was able to identify carrots, dill and lettuce without any help from me.

This was actually a very entertaining game and I hope we get to play it again. For those of you who are interested, we also got zucchini (a lot), yellow squash, beets, and possibly kohlrabi in addition to the things mentioned above.